{"id":137497,"date":"2023-06-10T06:04:36","date_gmt":"2023-06-10T12:04:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=137497"},"modified":"2023-06-10T07:17:16","modified_gmt":"2023-06-10T13:17:16","slug":"nesting-american-avocets-and-black-necked-stilts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/10\/nesting-american-avocets-and-black-necked-stilts\/","title":{"rendered":"Nesting American Avocets And Black-necked Stilts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I spent the morning at Bear River MBR. Nesting season continues and so do the inevitable conflicts between ground-nesting birds.<\/p>\n

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Since my last visit to the refuge nine days ago the water from the flooded Bear River appears to have gone down nearly a foot. As a result, this American Avocet was nesting far away from standing water, which is unusual for them.<\/p>\n

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The location of this Black-necked Stilt nest is far more typical of both species. That’s standing water directly behind the nest and there’s more water just out of frame at bottom. This nest is only a few feet from the auto tour road but the female stilt seems incredibly tolerant of the occasional vehicle going by.<\/p>\n

Stilts and avocets feed and nest in the same habitats so squabbles are inevitable. And common.<\/p>\n

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I think this stilt’s posture is unusual. It isn’t landing after an extended flight and it isn’t taking off so what’s going on?<\/p>\n

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It was being chased off by an aggressive avocet that thought the stilt was too close to its nest. The stilt didn’t have to go far before the avocet was satisfied and relative peace returned.<\/p>\n

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Recent visitors to the refuge have seen many hundreds of acres of flooded land near the Bear River along the 10 mile approach road and in one spot the road has had about 6″ of water flowing rapidly across it. Yesterday the floodwater had receded dramatically, much of the flooded land is now actually land again and the water isn’t even close to flowing across the road. This photo was taken nine days ago. The actual river is far off to the right.<\/p>\n

As of yesterday, state water managers report that there’s only 3.5% of the state’s snowpack left to melt in the mountains and come down to the valleys and all of it should be melted by the end of the month.<\/p>\n

It’s looking like both people and ground-nesting birds got lucky with what very easily could have been a devastating flooding season. Thanks to a slow spring warm-up, it wasn’t.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Yesterday I spent the morning at Bear River MBR. Nesting season continues and so do the inevitable conflicts between ground-nesting birds. (4 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[437,338,334,708,8,391],"tags":[27,6953,49,705,6951,228,6952],"class_list":["post-137497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-avocets-shore-birds","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-birds","category-black-necked-stilts","category-ecology-and-environment","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-american-avocet","tag-bear-river-flooding","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-black-necked-stilt","tag-conflicts-between-ground-nesting-birds","tag-nest","tag-utah-flooding"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/black-necked-stilt-2772-horizontal-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-zLH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137497"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137537,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137497\/revisions\/137537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}